A widow's punishment

The United States government has a very good reason for having and enforcing strict limits on "green-card marriages": There is significant potential for abuse, in the form of sham marriages solely for the purpose of obtaining legal immigrant status.

Each year, some 450,000 United States citizens marry foreign-born individuals. Most file the paperwork for their immigrant-spouses to obtain permanent residency status.

Foreign-born husbands and wives of U.S. citizens are considered "immediate relatives" under the law. However, if the marriage ends because of death or divorce before two years have elapsed, the foreign-born spouse must apply for a waiver to remain in the U.S.

Which brings us to the case of Osserritta Robinson. A native of Jamaica, she married Louis Robinson of Elm Park in early 2003.

They were married just eight months when Mr. Robinson, a chef at the Renaissance Hotel in Times Square, took the ferry home from work one day in October, 2003. The boat he got was the ill-fated Andrew J. Barberi, which crashed into a maintenance pier near the St. George Ferry Terminal. Mr. Robinson was one of 11 who were killed in the tragedy.

Shortly after their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson had begun the process of seeking permanent residency status for her by filing a petition for an immigrant visa with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. The wheels of the government bureaucracy turn slowly, however, and their petition was still pending when Mr. Robinson was killed.

Mrs. Robinson's status changed immediately upon her husband's death. No longer was she the wife of a citizen; she became the widow of a citizen. And because they had been married for less than the required two years, she is liable to be sent out of the country.

In 2007, a federal judge ordered USCIS to treat Mrs. Robinson as "a surviving spouse" in processing her application for permanent resident status.

However, the Justice Department appealed, and on Monday, the United States Court of Appeals reversed that earlier ruling. In a 2-1 decision, the majority cited the government's desire to strike a "balance between the goal of family unity and the legitimate expectations of an alien-spouse whose connections to the United States were likely to have become solidified during the two-year marriage period."

However, the judges ruled, "We conclude that a spouse ceases to be an immediate relative when the citizen spouse dies unless the couple had been married at least two years at the time of death."

Mrs. Robinson plans to appeal.

There's no question that she is no longer an "immediate relative" of Mr. Robinson, since he is deceased. However, she is the grieving widow of a perfectly legitimate marriage to a U.S. citizen. What's more, she clearly indicated her desire to become a permanent resident this country with her husband.

Now that he's gone, that desire has not wavered. If anything, her "connections to the United States" have more than "solidified" in the five years since the crash. Had the government moved more quickly on the petition she and her late husband filed, she would not be in this predicament. In effect, she's being punished because her husband was killed.

Senior Court of Appeals Judge Richard Nygaard, who dissented in the ruling, wrote that Mrs. Robinson is facing deportation "simply because the petition filed on her behalf by her deceased husband is stuck in the government's bureaucracy." He said it's "inconceivable" that an immigrant's status should be jeopardized because of the the government's failure to act in a timely manner.

"[Mrs. Robinson] has committed no crime," Judge Nygaard said. "She is innocent of any misbehavior. She is a grieving widow."

We agree. There are good reasons for the two-year rule and, in most cases, it should be applied. But this case cries out for a waiver. The legal mechanism for reversing this misguided -- and mean-spirited -- ruling is there. The courts must make this right. Mrs. Robinson has suffered enough.